1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to methods for managing one or more documents in a repository and, more specifically, to managing the documents in a plurality of repositories connected to a primary system that replicates to a backup system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) is a technical framework defined by Integrating Healthcare Environments (IHE) that facilitates the registration, distribution and access of patient electronic health records across health enterprises. It provides a standards-based specification for managing the sharing of documents between any healthcare enterprises.
Healthcare enterprises that widely use XDS for managing the sharing of health records include distinct entities having one or more separate responsibilities such as, for example, a private physician office, an acute care in-patient facility, a clinic and/or personal health record (PHR) systems. Since XDS is largely an architecture that relies on a stable network connection to share and access electronic health records from various healthcare enterprises, there is a risk for an XDS system that is currently in use to be inaccessible due to partial and/or complete site failures.
A partial system failure occurs when one or more, but not all, elements in the network operating the system are compromised. It can be caused by a software, hardware and/or network failure, which in turn causes a database management system (DBMS) server to be inaccessible for an unpredictable amount of time. A complete system failure may occur when a calamity, such as a fire, causes an entire system to be destroyed and rendered useless.
When either a partial or complete site failure occurs, XDS components, such as databases that contain information needed by healthcare enterprises, may become unavailable to users that need to store or retrieve data. The length of time it takes for the system to get back to an uptime condition and in a consistent state is unpredictable and the breakdown in functions and operations may cause loss of important documents and/or delays in the processing of valuable electronic medical records. The typical XDS architecture that is structured to share documents across healthcare enterprises may also contain gaps when implementing mission critical XDS for a healthcare enterprise with multiple facilities that requires storage management, high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR).
Accordingly, there is a need for an XDS architecture that fills in these gaps and that allows for efficient and robust operation of XDS across a domain of healthcare enterprises. There is a also need for an XDS architecture that is able to provide a high availability and/or disaster recovery solution for partial and/or complete site failures and allows flexibility during network downtime wherein users still have access to pertinent files and important medical records when needed.
XDS that is used in a fairly large domain of healthcare enterprises also tends to store a huge amount of data and information in its database server(s), which grows over time. When the size of the database needed to hold information becomes larger, the cost needed to maintain it also increases. Accordingly, there is also a need for an XDS solution for an improved, more efficient, and less expensive management of data. A solution to improve speed when accessing one or more files from a repository in an XDS architecture is also needed in order to increase efficiency and reliability of data management within the group of healthcare enterprises.